Laser insect photography rig

[Marc] sent in this awesome insect photography rig. The camera is manually pre-focused and set for a 30 second exposure at ISO100. The aluminum cylinder in front of the lens is an external shutter mounted with a custom turned lens adapter. It’s used because the built in shutter is too slow for insect capture. The camera/shutter is triggered by a pair of lasers with photo detectors. When both beams are broken, the insect should be in front of the lens. A Garmin GPS provides position information that’s tagged on the image by the Nikon D200. A large photo of the rig is here, while a more detailed writeup on building it is here.

Update: It looks like we covered a previous version of this rig, but the old links are down and we didn’t have a shot of the setup. Oh, and I forgot to mention [Marc] new control box for running this rig.

They just moved the site from skynet to pbase. Really guys, I can accept that you seem to want to turn into engadget or gizmodo and the like, but why the hell are you repeating your own posts? Especially since in the past you would past on posting a hack just because it appeared on Make or a similar sight and wasn’t relatively new and original (or at least, wasn’t with great enough merit to show twice). This camera rig is indeed a great set up, but you’ve done it before. How did no one catch that before this post went up?

eliot, apologies if i came across overly bitter (I was) but I’m still sorting out the current changes to the site, and like I said, in the past, I’ve seen tips turned down because they had already appeared on another aggregate site, so seeing Hack-A-Day duplicate itself without writing it from an “update” approach from the start is disheartening.